The September Sisters (7 page)

But Becky and I loved her, and we didn’t get to see her that much since she lived about six hours away from us. She was the only grandparent we ever knew. My father’s parents both died before he met my mother, and our grandfather Jacobson died right after Becky was born.

Grandma Jacobson had this funny red hair that she teased up in a poof on the top of her head. The hair was dyed;
underneath, it all was gray, which we saw a few months later after she got sick. We saw pictures of her when our mother was younger, and her hair was the same rich blond that my mother’s is now. But unlike my mother, Grandma Jacobson was short and a little pudgy, round and soft and full of energy. She’d take trips with her friends all over the world and send us presents—little wooden dolls from Sweden, stones from Israel, the sapphire necklaces from Madagascar. Becky and I weren’t even sure where Madagascar was. We pictured it as some exotic place where people ran around in jungles. My father had called her a crazy old bag for traveling there in the first place.

The night before we left, she pulled out the necklaces. “I want you to have these,” she told us. “My heart. I’m giving you girls my heart.”

She was always giving us presents and saying nice things like that, but that was the nicest, most adult present she ever gave us. We thanked her and jumped up and down and hugged her.

The next day, when my mother and father arrived to pick us up, Becky ran up to my parents to show them her necklace. “Really, Mom, you shouldn’t have,” my mom said. “They’re too young for this.”

“We’re not too young,” Becky and I chorused defiantly.

Grandma winked at us. “Oh, hush now, Elaine.”

Becky and I were amused when our grandmother told our mother to hush. Usually it worked, and we got to witness what it might have been like for our mother as a little girl. That day was no exception. Our mother didn’t say anything else about the necklaces until we were driving home in the car. “I wonder what she paid for those,” she said to my father.

He shrugged. He was driving with one hand and had his other hand on my mother’s knee. “She can afford it.”

“That’s not the point.” My mother turned to face us in the backseat. “Now, girls, you take good care not to lose those necklaces.”

“We won’t,” we chorused. When she turned back to face front, Becky and I rolled our eyes at each other.

A month later we found out our grandmother had cancer, and then the next time we saw her, that Thanksgiving, she was only ninety pounds and her hair was this crisp silvery gray. She couldn’t walk anymore, and she had a nurse who came in and fed her and wheeled her around in her wheelchair. “You don’t remember me this way,” she said to Becky and me over and over again.

We nodded, and I squeezed her bony hand, but sometimes it is hard to remember her any other way. Whenever I wanted to remember her the way she wanted me to, I’d take my heart necklace out and hold it in my palm. Her heart, she’d said. It was bright blue and sparkling, just the way she’d been that summer after her trip to Madagascar.

My grandmother died in March of that year, and that was the first time I ever really saw my mother sad. Her sadness lingered on for months, until she started smoking again and crying sometimes in the bathroom.

One night right after Grandma died and my father was working late, my mother took Becky and me for pizza. The light in the restaurant caught Becky’s necklace so it sparkled, catching my mother’s eye.

She picked the heart up her in hand. “Sometimes I wonder if she’s with us, watching over us.” I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant. But since then I sometimes wonder if my grandmother can see us. If she’s floating up somewhere watching our every move. I wonder if she knew when I touched the sapphire heart; I wonder if she felt it, a short, soft thump in the chest.

MAYBE IT WAS
the necklace that set my mother off, that pushed her to believe that Becky wasn’t coming home, but three days after I found the necklace, my mother decided to leave the house for the first time in two months and ended up crashing her car into a tree.

I was at school when it happened, and my father came to get me, pulling me out of last period. When I was called out of class to go down to the office, when I saw my father standing in there through the square windows, I thought they had found Becky. I felt something in my chest drop a little; then I felt the sharp, rapid pounding of my heart. Right after I had found the necklace, the police started digging up Morrow’s field along the edge of our backyard,
convinced they might find more clues, or worse, something my father didn’t say out loud, her body.

“Ab.” My father grabbed me in a hug, and I squirmed a little.

“What?” I asked. “Did they find her?”

He shook his head, and I exhaled. It was odd, but I felt a little relieved that Becky was still missing. Deep down I knew that any news about Becky wasn’t going to be good news.

“Your mother had an accident.”

The way he said it, I pictured my mother falling down the stairs, cutting her finger on a knife. “What happened?”

“Come on. Let’s go.”

I followed him to the car, suddenly nervous. My father had never come to pick me up from school before. And he wouldn’t have come if she’d only had a little fall, a few stitches. “What happened?” I asked him again when we got into the car.

“She hit a tree.” At first what he said didn’t register. I pictured her running into a tree in our backyard, the thick maple whose low, leafy branch Becky liked to climb. I imagined my mother running around the yard, crazy, trying to see what was going on in the field and smack, right into the
tree. “On Old Juniper Road. You know where it curves real hard.”

I knew exactly where he was talking about. Old Juniper Road runs up along the outer edge of Pinesboro, winding from east to west above us. It was the road we sometimes took to the mall, only my mother hated driving on it because it was so winding. I wondered what my mother was doing out. As far as I knew, she hadn’t gone anywhere since Becky disappeared. “Is she okay? Is she hurt?”

“I don’t know.” My father ran his hand over his thinning hair, in a sort of odd combing motion. “She’s at Pinesboro Hospital. I got the call, and I stopped to get you on the way.”

“She called you?”

He shook his head. “No, someone from the hospital.”

“Oh.” It was odd, but I didn’t feel frightened. I felt numb in a way, used to the tragedy of what had become my everyday life. I wonder if that was how my mother felt those first weeks after Becky disappeared, if that was why she was able to stay in bed for so long.

In another way, I felt like an adult with my father for the first time. This was the only time in my life I’d felt somewhat like his equal. I was pleased that he’d picked me up
from school to take me to the hospital with him rather than sent Mrs. Ramirez to fetch me and make me supper.

It turned out that my mother had only a mild concussion and some pretty bad bone bruises even though she hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. The doctor, who seemed obnoxious and much younger than my father, told us it was amazing, that he’d seen accidents like this before where much worse had happened, even when people were wearing their seat belts. “She was just lucky, I guess,” the doctor said.

“So she’s okay then?” my father asked.

The doctor cleared his throat, looked quickly at me and then back at my father. “Physically she will be, yes.”

It seemed like an odd answer to me right away. But as soon as the doctor said my mother wasn’t wearing her seat belt, I realized that something just didn’t add up. My mother is a staunch seat belt enforcer; she never starts the car until she hears a click from everyone. We were reading
Hamlet
in English class, and I immediately thought of a line from it that we’d discussed earlier in the week. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

“Can we see her?” my father asked.

The doctor nodded. “We’d like to keep her for a
few days for observation.”

“A few days?” I couldn’t tell if my father sounded relieved or upset. I figured he must be putting the pieces together. A winding road that my mother hated driving on. No seat belt. Observation. I wondered exactly what they would observe her for. But I thought this might have been my mother’s idea of a suicide attempt. She loved drama, and she hated blood, so I didn’t think she’d slit her wrists in the bathtub or anything like that.

My mother was resting in a hospital bed in a private room. When we walked in to see her, she had the TV on. She looked like she was watching it, because she was staring right at it, but when I looked at her closely, I saw her eyes were glazed over, that she was actually staring right through the TV, past it to somewhere else, somewhere invisible to us.

My father went to her and kissed her forehead. “Jesus, Elaine, you scared the life out of me.” She stayed perfectly still, like a glass doll that might break if you shook it. And it looked like my father was tempted to shake her, to make her react to him in some way, because he stood back and stared at her for a minute, as if he weren’t sure what he should do next.

I hung back by the doorway, not sure what to say or do, afraid to interrupt my father’s moment. The doctor came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I tried to shake him off subtly, and he took the hint and walked toward my father.

“Maybe you two should go,” the doctor said.

My father shook his head. “I can’t leave her. I have to stay here.”

“She needs her rest. Really, it would be better.”

“Elaine.” My father shook her shoulder gently. “Do you want me to stay?”

She didn’t answer him. I started to feel invisible again; only this time I wished I weren’t there at all. I wished this had been something my father tried to shield me from, something he’d come home from and told me barely any of the details of. Just hearing that my mother had a mild concussion and would be home in a few days would’ve been fine. Suddenly I didn’t want to be an adult at all.

My father and I left about fifteen minutes later. The doctor finally convinced my father that he should take me home, and as soon as he mentioned “your daughter,” my father seemed to remember me, his duty to try to protect me from
things, and he shuffled me out to the car.

“You can go back,” I told him. “I can go over to Mrs. Ramirez’s.”

He shook his head. “I already called her. She’s picking her grandson up at the airport tonight.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t known her grandson was coming. It was strange that she hadn’t mentioned it to me, when usually she’d talk and talk and talk about how wonderful her grandchildren were, how someday she would move to Florida to spoil them. So that was why my father had picked me up from school himself. He hadn’t really had a choice other than leaving me there, stranded, or allowing me to walk home on my own. “I can stay by myself,” I told him.

“No, Ab, there’s no way.”

“I’d be fine.”

“It’s not up for discussion.”

When we got home, my father called Harry Baker to find out about my mother’s accident report and the condition of the car. Apparently the car was totaled, a twisted wrap of metal.

My father got off the phone and sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. I felt bad for him. I wanted to comfort him, but I never said the right thing, so I just sat
there with him, saying nothing.

After a few moments of sitting like that he looked up. “It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it, Ab?”

I shrugged, not willing to admit, even to myself, how lonely I was, how tired I was of being involved in a terrible, terrible mess. “I’m okay.”

“You’re a good kid,” he said. “You know that. A real good kid.”

It was quite possibly the nicest thing my father ever said to me, so I didn’t want to tell him that I wasn’t a kid anymore, that I wished I could be a kid more than anything.

THE DAY AFTER
my mother’s accident was a Saturday, and when my father went back to the hospital to visit her, he dropped me off at Mrs. Ramirez’s house on the way. Secretly I was relieved. I hated hospitals anyway. The way sickness smelled so clean, so much like the Lysol my mother used to use to clean the bathroom.

When I walked into Mrs. Ramirez’s house, I saw her grandson, Thomas Greer, for the first time. He was sitting in Mrs. Ramirez’s living room watching Saturday-morning cartoons, drinking orange juice from a juice box. “This my grandson.” Mrs. Ramirez pointed to him. I could tell she was excited. She was hopping a little bit and smiling, so her chubby brown face looked as if it were
about to burst. “He live here now.”

I was surprised. I’d thought that he was only coming for a visit, not to stay. Then I instantly began to dread all the long afternoons I’d have to spend with him. At first glance he didn’t look like the kind of boy I’d want to associate myself with.

He was tall, taller than I was anyway, with skin that looked even darker than Mrs. Ramirez’s, and he had this big bushy mop of black hair that fell into his eyes. Mrs. Ramirez reached over and pushed the hair back behind his ears, and he cringed. He looked right at me, and I saw his eyes, huge deep brown eyes that stared at me like lost, open holes, so he suddenly reminded me of one of those skinny, needy kids you see on TV; you know, the ones you can help save with forty cents a day, the price of a cup of coffee. “You sit.” Mrs. Ramirez pointed to a spot on the couch right next to him. “This Ah-bee-hail. My little neighbor girl I tell you about.”

I felt myself blushing. I wondered exactly what Mrs. Ramirez had said about me, and I felt the way I did in school, out of place, ridiculous. “This Thomas, my grandson.” Only when she said his name, it sounded like toe-moss. “You be friends.” She pushed my shoulder down, practically forcing
me to sit next to him. “You sit. I get you drink.” She left the two of us sitting there and went into the kitchen.

It’s funny that Mrs. Ramirez thought pushing me to sit on the couch next to him would make us become instant friends. Since Jocelyn had started ignoring me, I’d begun to give up on the idea of friendship, on the idea that there are other people in the world who will love you unconditionally, aside from your parents and your grandparents, who are required to love you that way. But I didn’t want to be mean to Thomas, to snub him or anything like that. So I just sat there for a minute or so, trying to figure out how to achieve the balance between friendly and polite, between declining Mrs. Ramirez’s offer of friendship and being mean. Finally I said, “So, Thomas, how come you came to live here?”

“You can call me Tommy,” he said. “That’s what everyone called me in Florida.”

I nodded. “Well,” I said, trying to think of something interesting to say, “you must like your grandmother.” Even as I said it, I couldn’t really picture anyone loving Mrs. Ramirez the way I had loved Grandma Jacobson.

“She’s okay.” He picked up the TV remote and turned up the volume, so it would’ve been impossible for us to talk to each other without yelling.

Mrs. Ramirez came back in with my juice, but then she left us to go clean upstairs. “You be friends,” she said three times before leaving, “right, Thomas?” She pushed his hair back away from his face and tucked it behind his ears, and he pulled away again. She kissed the top of his head and went upstairs.

I tried to make eye contact with him, to show him I sympathized on some level. I hate it when adults manhandle me, like I’m their toy or something. But he wouldn’t look at me. He stared straight ahead at the TV, occasionally sipping his juice.

We sat there in silence for the rest of the morning, until my father came to pick me up around noon.

Just after I got home from Mrs. Ramirez’s house, the doorbell rang. My father was upstairs taking a shower. He hadn’t said it, but my guess was he was trying to wash off the smell of the hospital. I was thinking about Tommy, wondering why exactly he’d come to live with Mrs. Ramirez. I couldn’t imagine a time when my parents ever would’ve sent Becky or me to live with Grandma Jacobson permanently.

I didn’t think my father heard the bell since he didn’t come down, so I answered the door and saw Kinney and
Harry Baker standing there. Every time I saw a police officer on the porch, I felt my heart race. I felt the way I had when I’d seen my father at school the day before: suddenly excited, alarmed, wondering if my life would change into something even more terrible or something hopeful.

Kinney nodded at me in that uptight way he had of looking at everyone. Harry gave a funny little wave, and I had the sudden image of him in his catcher’s mask reaching out for the ball.

“My dad’s in the shower,” I told them.

But I guess he had heard the doorbell after all, because before I knew it, he was downstairs, walking up behind me, clamping his hand on my shoulder. “Paul, Harry. Be right with you.” Before then I didn’t know that Kinney’s first name was Paul. It felt odd to think of him as a real person, with a real first name. When I thought of him as Kinney, he seemed like this distant, unreal thing. I preferred him that way.

“Ab, why don’t you go to your room?” He was back to being fatherly again, back to trying to shield me from the world. Only this I didn’t want to be shielded from. I wanted to know every detail of what was going on in Becky’s case.

I could tell my father was preoccupied, and I was
convinced he wouldn’t notice if I pretended to walk up toward my room; but I actually sat at the top of the stairs, where I could hear most of what they were saying.

I think Kinney and Harry were doing what is always called “good cop bad cop” on TV. I’d seen something like that in a movie before, where Eddie Murphy is the good cop and the other guy looks like a real jerk. Harry was the good guy, trying to sympathize with my father and so on and so forth. And Kinney was asking all sorts of questions, trying to get my father to break down.

Basically, the police had looked at my mother’s accident, her withdrawal, her mental state and combined them with the fact that they had no suspects, no witnesses, no proof, no signs of “forced entry.” Then they had, as Kinney put it, put “two and two together.”

“Jesus Christ, Harry,” my father yelled, probably louder than he meant to because after that he lowered his voice, and I couldn’t really make out what he was saying.

A few minutes later I heard Kinney saying something about my father’s trying to convince my mother to tell him what she knew. Then he said something about getting her the help she needed.

I knew that my mother wasn’t the one responsible for
Becky’s disappearance. And it took every ounce of common sense I had to keep from running down there and screaming that at them. I wondered if my father believed them, or if, like me, he was furious that they were wasting their time, that they weren’t out there trying to figure out what really happened to Becky.

They left a few minutes later, but before they did, I heard Harry say to my father, “We could use your help, Jim. Becky could.” It made me feel so angry to hear him say that, so deeply betrayed.

I realized then that I was going to have to find the person who took Becky. This would be the only way to convince the police that it hadn’t been my mother.